Brief South Park Update

Just a quick update: the version of South Park episode # 201 currently airing on the Comedy Network is (as expected) the same as the one that aired on Comedy Central, with the same bleeps, including bleeps of four-letter words. For the last couple of years TCN has aired the unbleeped versions of most South Park episodes (though with some odd exceptions, like the f-words in the whale/dolphin episode), but Comedy Central has not made any unbleeped version of this episode available yet.

There still continues to be surprising silence about the controversy from the network (which has said nothing except to confirm that it was responsible for the bleeps) and even Parker and Stone, who haven’t made any statements since the one they released the day after the episode aired. Since there’s no ban on talking about it at the network — Jon Stewart did a whole segment on it — I wonder what exactly is behind this, or if any of it will be addressed in the next episode.

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About this author

Associate Editor Jaime Weinman has been at Maclean's longer than he can remember, writing articles on entertainment of all kinds, plus an occasional dip into politics. He's an obsessive buff on classic television and animation, and he also has a law degree that he still doesn't quite know what to do with.

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Brief South Park Update

Ok everyone, now, whatever you do, don't talk about … m…mm.
Only time will tell if Parker and Stone are just a couple of cartoonists, or masters of manipulation. Someday seismologists will deliberately create small earthquakes in order to prevent bigger ones. If that's what they are doing, then I think they have a far
better chance of winning the hearts and minds of muslims than those who are trying to do it at gunpoint.

I invite everyone to join in "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day." This event will be Thursday, May 20, 2010. They now have a Facebook event listed. I invite everyone to go take a look at these well deserved drawings of Mohammed on Facebook. Enjoy! I know I did.

Bart wrote a note on the blackboard last night to the effect that "we'd be with you except we're scared" (somebody please supply the actual quote). And August Pollak's cartoon of the week is here:http://www.xoverboard.com/cartoons/2010/100426_ce…

This is true. I recorded all 3 time slots out of curiosity; the broadcast Shaw viewers received was cat pee. Which also happens to be the one we got on April 23, so it was particularly annoying that we missed it. Of course I had it off the net well before then, but whatever.

I’ve emailed both Shaw and The Comedy Network to see what happened to the episode, the response from The Comedy Network was:

Thanks for your comments about last week’s episode of South Park.

The Comedy Network prides itself on airing South Park uncut and uncensored. However, we only had access to the censored version of this particular episode. Our choices were to either air it as it was, or not to air it at all. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that not airing it would constitute even more censorship, and that it was best to broadcast the episode as it was delivered to us so that our viewers could make their own conclusions.

That said, we’d still really like to know what Kyle said.

Sincerely,

The Comedy Network

—————

Based on that, I am considering canceling my Shaw subscriptions. It most definitely isn’t on the carrier to censor the content.

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